Financial Responsibility
The financial irresponsibility of the federal government during the last 6 years of Republican rule has been breathtaking. A projected 10-year 10-trillion dollar surplus inherited from the Clinton Administration has been reversed and turned into a $9 trillion dollar deficit. Party affiliation is clearly no longer any guarantee of financial responsibility. Fixing this mess will depend on leaders with business skill and discipline.
It is common for our representatives in Congress to come home to and proudly announce their pork projects: a million-dollar road improvement here, a fire engine there, and so on. But what you never see in those press releases is that every single year our district is taxed to pay over $500 Million in interest on the debt built up while George Bush and Dennis Hastert were in charge.
Like most of us, I believe we need to invest in education, in small business assistance, on health care and other domestic priorities to strengthen us here at home. But the debt built up by President Bush and Speaker Hastert is preventing us from doing this. Paying down this debt must be the first order of business. I intend to work with the Blue Dog Democrats in congress -- a group dedicated to curing this by making the hard decisions necessary -- as well as any other groups that make deficit reduction their top priority. I'm sure that I'll be at odds with the Blue Dogs on more than a few issues - for example mortgage industry reform - but when it comes to deficit reduction, we all agree that we have to get our house in order.
I also believe that there is a strong moral aspect to the situation with the national debt. I believe that it is actively immoral to leave each of our children with tens of thousands of dollars of government debt, just because our generation wants to receive more government services and payments than we are willing to ourselves pay for. And I understand that when the system teeters past the point of financial collapse, that those who suffer will not be the wealthy who have taken their tax breaks and moved their equity safely into off-shore mutual funds: it will be working people and those who depend on the safety net from government services.
There is another aspect of the Bush/Hastert debt that rarely gets talked about. The debt levels in our national budget severely limit our government's ability to take decisive action if, for example, the real-estate bubble starts to violently burst. Many people in Kane and Kendall counties and the 14th District are very heavily mortgaged and would be very badly hurt if speculation fueled by the Bush/Hastert debt triggers a collapse of real-estate market values. This danger is another reason why the debt should be responsibly, and quickly, paid down.